June 4 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil for
the World Cup have been warned: beware the chupacabra.

Card cloning is common in Brazil, so U.S. citizens should
take precautions when withdrawing money and check account
activity often, the U.S. Citizen Services office in Brazil said
on its Twitter account. Thirty percent of Brazilians experienced
card fraud in the last five years, according to ACI Worldwide’s
Global Consumer Fraud Survey of 6,000 people to be released
later this month. That’s the seventh-most of 20 nations.

The world’s most-watched sports event begins in eight days,
and Americans are the largest foreign group of World Cup ticket-holders. Whereas Brazilian banks have put clients’ identifying
information in so-called smart chips to prevent cloning, many
foreign cards don’t possess the technology. Devices used to skim
card information are dubbed chupacabras after the mythical
creature said to drink the blood of goats.

“Years back, all Brazilian cards migrated to chip-and-pin
technology just to tackle this type of fraud, which has been a
successful initiative,” Joel Nunes, an ACI solutions consultant
in Brazil, said in an e-mail. “As Brazil welcomes visitors
using cards with older technology, there is an opportunity for
fraudsters to again use sophisticated skimming devices.”

‘Clamp Down’

One such chupacabra struck Lyn Donelson, 34, at the onset
of his three-month trip through the country in January. His card
was cloned at an ATM in Rio de Janeiro’s main airport, and he
didn’t receive a replacement card for more than two weeks.

An airport “should be a secure location,” Donelson, of
Iowa, said by phone. “It makes me wonder what’s going to happen
for the World Cup. I’m sure there will be a lot of fraud and
theft, but somehow they’ll try to clamp down.”

To be sure, South Africa, which hosted the 2010 World Cup,
had the same level of card fraud as Brazil in ACI’s 2014 survey.
Of respondents from the U.S., 41 percent experienced card fraud,
the fourth-most of the nations surveyed and more than Brazil.
The United Arab Emirates took over the top spot from Mexico.

The U.S. expects more than 180,000 American citizens to
visit Brazil during the World Cup, U.S. Ambassador Liliana
Ayalde said in comments published yesterday on the American
Chamber of Commerce of Rio de Janeiro’s website. More than
30,000 visitors to the last World Cup in South Africa hailed
from the U.S.